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Mark Bittman Proclaims “Butter is Back” in The New York Times

Mark Bittman, an award-winning food columnist for The New York Times, is happy to report that the tides are finally turning away from low-fat diets back towards embracing healthy, wholesome, natural foods that include butter and full-fat dairy products. In his recent column, Butter is Back, he notes that this shift in attitudes has been on the horizon for quite some time, but has been legitimized by a meta-analysis published in the March 2014 journal Annals of Internal Medicine that found no sufficient evidence to support the notion that saturated fat increases the risk of heart disease.

Bittman believes that the guidelines to avoid saturated fat came about because “…regulators were too timid to recommend that we eat less meat, [because] meat in itself isn’t bad; it’s about quantity and quality.” The root of our nation’s food problem is that over the years there occurred a “…transformation of ingredients we could once take for granted or thought of as healthy. Indeed, meat, dairy, wheat and corn have become foods that frequently contain antibiotics and largely untested chemicals.”

In lieu of fatty foods (even good, natural fatty foods like avocados and nuts), Americans began to eat ultra-processed “low-fat,” sugary foods that have become the real villains in our diet. Bittman’s recommendation? For people to “abandon fake food for real food, and in that category of real food you can include good meat and dairy.”

In a follow-up piece by NPR correspondent Allison Aubrey, she notes that the American Heart Association says it stands by its recommendations to limit saturated fat.

Whenever any meaningful study is released, researchers on the other side of the issue always seem to respond that “more studies are necessary.” What remains to be seen is whether consumers allow their diets to be dictated by decades of debated science or their own intuitions.